Krugman: Advisory Panels will Reduce Costs with Rationing

Paul Krugman, the Progressive economist writing for the New York Times and a major spokesman for the Progressive viewpoint, said on ABC News Sunday during the show "This Week" that

The People on the right, they're simultaneously screaming, 'They're going to send all the old people to death panels,' and 'It's not going to save any money.

The advisory panel which has the ability to make more or less binding judgments on saying this particular expensive treatment actually doesn't do any good medically and so we are not going to pay for it. That is actually going to save quite a lot of money. We don't know how much yet. The CBO gives it very little credit but, but most, most of the health care economists I talk to think that's going be a really, uh a really major cost saving.

Krugman is saying that the ObamaCare program will have to ration medical care more than it presently is rationed in order to save money.  It will do so with advisory panels whose decision is close to that of the Grim Reaper in finality.  The patient and the doctor and the patient's family will have little to no say.  The advisory panel's decision is "more or less binding."  It is dictated.

Note the sleight-of-hand in his first statement in which he concatenates the critic's statement that rationing will occur and it will result in more deaths with their statement that ObamaCare will cost a lot more money and raise premium prices in such a straw-man way as to make the statements appear to be contradictory.  Yet, it is elementary, my dear Krugman, to note that the latter statement of ObamaCare raising net costs does not mean that ObamaCare will not take desperate measures to ration really important care in life and death situations in order to free up money to pay for the much added costs of people seeing a care provider for their many sniffles.

So, as I have noted many times, ObamaCare must ration medical services.  Of course medical services are always rationed.  They used to be rationed by a combination of the ability to pay and the willingness of doctors to provide the truly needy with free or greatly reduced cost care.  Now they will be rationed by an Obama advisory panel of government bureaucrats, who will come between the patient and his family and the patient's doctor, who will not really be the patient's doctor at all, because the doctors will all be owned by the government.  Now, how many times did Obama and his horde of allies tell us that "No one will come between you and your doctor."?????

While it is true that medical care is and always must be rationed, there are very important further differences in which care will be rationed.  ObamaCare will measure its success in the number of doctor visits made to address the sniffles.  There will be many more such visits to the doctor than now because people will not have to pay out of their own pockets for those visits.  They have also committed ObamaCare to much more preventive medicine, even though this also drives cost up, contrary to their claims.  The extra sniffles visits and the preventive medical care will drive the total cost of medical care sharply upward.  At least partially compensating savings will have to be made.  Now, where can savings be made?  Given the ObamaCare commitments, the only time to save lots of money is when most medical expenditure has occurred in the past.  Very rationally, this has been when the care was most needed to extend life and is usually encountered with older people or babies.  Obama and his friends have made it very clear in unguarded moments in the past, that they do not like the fact that so much medical money is spent on babies and the elderly.  They have argued that babies and the elderly have little social value.  They have complained very bitterly about this, but by hiding it in general statements such as Americans spend too much on health care during the recent debates.

So, the advisory panel will look at cost to life extension and future life quality and decide what procedures are worth it, given the budgetary constraints of ObamaCare.  Procedures that were worth the effort to doctors, their patients, and their insurance companies will now be deemed not worth it.  There must be added savings to compensate for the sniffles and the preventive medicine.  The advisory panel will have to decide that grannies and babies who used to be worth the medical effort to save are not now worth the medical effort to save.  However much, the Progressives do not want these panels to be called Death Panels, they are tasked with the necessary job of pulling the plug on granny or your newborn baby.  The plug will have to be pulled much more frequently than we as free people ever allowed it to be pulled.  Now that all value decisions are to be made on a collective basis, your granny and your baby are worth much less in the future than they were in the past.

So, the reality is that just as the Progressive tries to hide the fact he is a Socialist behind a deceiving name implying he is the Angel of the Future Better Society, his Advisory Panel is exactly what Sarah Palin called the Death Panel.  The Advisory Panel serves the purpose of the Grim Reaper, who must cull society of its weak members.  The Weak are Expensive and not Worth it to the Collective.  And on and on, they will insist that we are not fair in identifying them as Socialists.

Our granny may be weak, but when she was our granny, she was loved and she was valuable.  Under ObamaCare, our granny is just a nationalized wee little bit of the Collective.  She is no longer your granny.  She is old and weak and not much regarded by the Collective.  Granny is now very expendable.  So is your newborn baby, if your baby has a serious health problem.  Get used to it.  Or, man the barricades and fight as you have never fought before to save your granny and your future babies!

This is not the time for Summer Soldiers, this is the crisis that can only be met by Winter Soldiers!  We must stand for the equal, sovereign rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  We must realize that our individual rights and our individual values mean nothing to any too powerful government.  They never have in all of history.  Our Founding Fathers and the Framers of the Constitution knew this very well.  They gave us a Constitution which tightly constrained the federal government with very limited powers in order to protect our individual rights and values.  Our federal government has pushed and pushed to expand its powers far, far beyond those given to it in this wonderful Constitution.  The People have not stopped them in this expansion of government power to this time.  Will you finally become the Winter Soldier for Freedom to save your granny and your future baby?  If you will not, you consent to their being expendable.